NH Sea Ice Heading for Record Minimum?

Seeing the yellow line drop so far below the historic curves with much of the melt season ahead of us means we are probably on the way to a new record minimum for the Northern hemisphere. Correspondingly, NH Sea ice anomaly is approaching the second lowest value in history:

For perspective, Antarctic ice is high now making global sea ice level unremarkable.

dpsaid

Not unless they can tell us definitively what the sea ice coverage should be this year and why. There is nothing special about the period of collected data except that it is the entire period and so tells us nothing about the history. Anyone who wishes to make a SWAG as to what it all means is free to do so but to claim any certainty about what they think it all means makes them out to be fools.

The only thing I see so far is we’re moving farther away from the LIA each year and nobody knows what the consequences of that are.

Ian Georgesaid

Anonymoussaid

Steven Goddard makes the observation that nearly all of the remaining ice is above 80 degrees north and the temperature above 80 north has already fallen below freezing. So the bottom should occur early this year.

David Jaysaid

timetochooseagainsaid

I’m not convinced that air temperature is a very good predictor of the ice extent/area. After all, there’s been very little trend in the really warm days in the Arctic in the last thirty years but the greatest trend seems to be in the minima. Clearly the relationship between temperature and ice in the Arctic is not completely straighforward.

orson2said

Ron C.said

“Differences between the NIC ice chart sea ice record and the passive microwave sea ice record are highly significant despite the fact that the NIC charts are semi-dependent on the passive microwave data, and it is worth noting these differences. . . We find a baseline difference in integrated ice concentration coverage north of 45N of 3.85% ± 0.73% during November to May (ice chart concentrations are larger). In summer, the difference between the two sources of data rises to a maximum of 23% peaking in early August, equivalent to ice coverage the size of Greenland.”

Right now, the NIC charts for August show 2012 and 2007 about the same, with a dip for 2007 starting this time of the month. And the extent shown is higher than NSIDC shows, consistent with the above finding.

Ron C.said

The NASA extent reports are even more questionable regarding Canadian ice extent.

More than 1380 regional Canadian weekly sea-ice charts for four Canadian regions and 839 hemispheric U.S. weekly sea-ice charts from 1979 to 1996 are compared with passive microwave sea-ice concentration estimates using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Team algorithm. Compared with the Canadian regional ice charts, the NASA Team algorithm underestimates the total ice-covered area by 20.4% to 33.5% during ice melt in the summer and by 7.6% to 43.5% during ice growth in the late fall.

KevinMsaid

So we got our 33-year minimum. No sense making a big deal about it. It is possible that all of the ice goes away, as it has done in the past, and you lose credibility if you claim it can’t or won’t happen. Lets see if the trend continues down, as the color-sacle shows.

In this and other climate topics I’d prefer we just collect the same data using the same methods for decades, and share it widely without any corrections.

I’m still open to the idea that AGW is real, I just don’t think its important relative to the availability of crude, the proliferation of modern weapons and the Spanish 10-year bond rate.